A Day With Christine and the Queens

Four days after arriving in New York City for the first time ever, Christine and the Queens performed for Hillary Clinton. "I think I won her over," Christine says, deadpan, walking out of her hotel into the cold spring day. In an oversized camel coat, cropped pants and sneakers, Christine is anonymous on the street in midtown, not like in France, where she plays arena shows and just won two Grammy equivalents. Her black floppy hat blows in the wind, and she pulls it off, looking around curiously.

It’s been a week of firsts: a debut set at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a performance on VH1, a show at the UN (thus Hillary). And she was in California last week—another first. "The East and West Coasts are like two different movies," she says. White flowers float off the trees, fall on our faces. Christine, about to catch a plane back to Paris, is wearing her overstuffed carry-on backpack. I ask if it’s not too heavy for a walk. "Oh no," she says quickly, hoisting the bag up on her shoulders. "Keeps me grounded."

Christine is not Christine’s real name. She was born Héloïse Letissier, a strange kid in a family of teachers, a creative maniac who spent her afternoons in ballet and her nights writing short stories. ("I was 11," she says, "and my mother would come to me like, ‘Did you write this? It’s about a murder.’") Her live set, like her minimalist, color-saturated music videos, is dance-heavy. Aided by her intensely charismatic backup dancers Diablo and Nick, Christine punctuates her sweet, off-kilter pop music with a distinct type of movement: a mix of Michael Jackson, fluid contemporary, vogue. She’s glad to be dancing again. She gave it up briefly in her late teens, just a few years before the depression that brought her to making music—and before that, into the arms of three drag queens at Madame Jojo’s, a now-closed venue in London, where Christine was trying and failing to go to school.

The titular Queens were onstage the first time she saw them, doing an abstract and showy performance-art bit that Christine says "radiated an enormous amount of simultaneous joy and pain." She introduced herself, fell in with them. She’d stopped going to classes—"I was this clueless girl"—and they decided: let’s find this little one something to do. One day they heard her humming along to a film score and said, do it again, do it louder, girl! She was already writing; the Queens suggested that she try music for a change. So Christine bought a laptop with GarageBand on it and spent a week hunched over her computer in pajamas, writing a song every day. "It was not good to watch," she says. "Friends would drop by, and they were like—" Christine pulls a face, comic near-disgust flickering in her hazel eyes.

A half-implied, half-explicit identity crisis, navigated with urgency and ease, is central to Christine’s music. Her Saint Claude EP, which came out in April on Neon Gold/Atlantic, starts with "iT", a song whose chorus refrain is "Cause I won/ I’m a man now/ Cause I got it/ I’m a man now." Her tone, which Mark Ronson has called "exactly what I like—gravelly, [with] texture," is raw on those lines, which feel less metaphorical than temporarily delusional: a moment of bliss that fades sonically, just as it did in real life.

"The gender question has always obsessed me," Christine says, as we dodge strollers pushed by moms in yoga pants. As an adolescent, she wore flouncy skirts, heavy makeup, costuming herself in femininity as a way of trying to understand it, "to figure out this riddle." It didn’t work. She wrote "iT" about the moments when she’d wonder, as a teenager, if things wouldn’t be easier if she was a man. But Christine wasn’t, which the drag queens at Jojo’s were quick to remind her. Part of "iT" is written in their voices: "She wants to be born again, but she’ll lose," chimes an interlude. "She draws her own crotch by herself, but she’ll lose/ it’s a fake, it’s a fake, it’s a fake."

Still, a persona that fits even for a moment is a way of accessing desire. "That’s part of what made me interested in theater as a kid," she says. "It made it acceptable to be a man for an hour onstage." There was a sexual component to this, also: Christine wondered, in high school, if her sense of herself as masculine meant that she loved women, which turned out to be true. She’s bisexual, a fact she decided to be free with in the media when a French marriage equality law was passed the same year she released her first EPs. "It felt important to say, and I didn’t feel like I was exposing my personal life," she says. "I was just stating my sexual orientation. But of course, some French dudes working for big newspapers would interview me and say, ‘So you like both cocks and vaginas,’ and I thought, they were the ones making this all obscene."

Walking on the flower-scattered paths of the park, Christine keeps talking lightly but surely about mixing pronouns—she and he, her and him—whenever she writes about love in her music. She’s long past her crisis point; as with Haim and Chvrches, there is a spiked assurance, an easy effervescence, about both her music and the way she carries herself. Going onstage now isn’t a transformation anymore, not in the way it was when she did theater. Christine isn’t an alter ego but rather a space that people are free to project upon—the distilled part of her that never feels afraid. "In real life I feel tiny and quite embarrassed all the time," she says. "But when people come up to me in France and want to talk to Christine, it’s okay. It’s cool. Because they’re really talking about themselves, their own Christines."

This sense of herself as a mirror for the audience is Christine’s way of negotiating the female artist’s unfair dilemma: if you want to be the subject but are viewed as the object, why not be an object that reflects the subject back? The first time I saw her perform live, at a late-night SXSW set, I felt almost paralyzed by the particular thing she inculcated between herself and the audience. It’s rare to see a female pop artist so resistant to adoration, asking to be allowed to adore instead. This, ultimately, is the part of her project that plays with gender in the most meaningful and natural way. "Male rock stars are sexy because they desire you first," she says. "I want to be like that." Onstage, she plays out this idea in a way that feels queer, direct, and communal; in Austin, I felt something like how I’d felt seeing sissy bounce for the first time as a teenager visiting New Orleans.

We’re walking out of the park, passing the carriage horses, and we pull back from the intersection as the light flicks to green and the cars zoom by, zipping close. Christine’s pale brown hair blows across her face. "What if I died while you were interviewing me," she says. "The Last 30 Minutes of Christine and the Queens."

A good headline. "Let’s do it," she says, the pigeons swirling, the horns honking. For a moment she seems poised to charge on in.